I am even getting used to having conversations there, although it is much more difficult in ADN than it is in Plurk, a forum, or even in ADN’s own Patter. That is simply because one’s stream is a very long list of individual, seemingly unrelated, posts. This leaves a very good chance that you will miss parts of a conversation in which you might be interested.

Conversely, in Patter as a conversational example, the entirety of a conversation is conserved. Anyone entering the conversation can review it quickly in it’s entirety, if necessary, or from their last point of entry. That really does make it much more convenient to carry on a meaningful conversation.

In addition, a truly conversational view of one’s ADN stream would be much shorter and considerably easier to keep track of. As an example, let’s say you follow and/or are followed by 100 people, and on average those people post 50 items a day. In stream view, one at a time, you would be sifting through 5000 posts a day.

Most of the people you are followed by and who follow you will wind up in a lot of the same conversations. It is likely, using experience gained in almost five years on Plurk (and a quarter-million personal posts) and in countless forums, this tends to consolidate many posts into “responses” to a few “original posts” which start topics. An average ratio of this phenomenon is 10-20 responses per original post.

Using an average of 15 responses per original topic post, we can immediately divide the number of topics we have to keep track of in a day by 15; that reduces our total need-to-scan items from 5000 to 333. And with a unified timeline turned on, you will even see post from people not directly in your stream, helping you to see people in action and make new friends. And all of this while not missing a thing from your own private stream.

There are a lot of benefits to viewing your ADN stream as a series of conversations. Give me a shout (@KDFrawg on ADN) if you think you might like to see a client that uses the ADN stream in this conversational manner.

It is, like many new and as yet comfortably small things, a pleasure from start to finish, with just a few raw spots. The biggest selling point is the people; App.net has not as yet been overrun by marketers, spammers, celebrities, and similar “personalities.” The place is full of early adopters, very bright early adopters. At the beginning, as the name would indicate, the site-slash-service was developer-heavy, which is not at all a bad thing; geeks are a hot item right now. As the numbers grew, more and more non-developers showed up, and there is now a fine blend of interests and personalities.

App.net does not collect or sell information of any kind about its users. Aside from the people that it has attracted (and those it has not attracted), that is the primary difference between it and Twitter, along with the marvelously open API and the clients that it has spawned, each giving a slightly different experience. There are almost as many ways to use and enjoy App.net as there are people to meet there, if all the permutations are considered.

In order not to collect and sell information about its users, App.net started out as a (modest) subscription-based service, which was my philosophical reason to join. Recently, it has become to offer a “freemium” membership with certain limitations, giving people a chance to try before they buy. The jury is still out on how well that has worked, both in converting free users to paid users and in not diluting the heady and intelligent waters of ADN. Only time will tell. It is easy to control your own experience here, so YOUR App.net need never go bad.

The bottom line is that this is the best social networking experience that I have enjoyed since the halcyon days of CompuServe. Yes, I am that old, and I have made many stops between that aged service and App.net. This is where the smart action is in social sites right now and, because it is intelligently extensible, it may remain that way for a long time to come.

It is very Twitter-like at its base, so most people will feel at home at App.net. You’ll need to bring your best game; it’s that kind of place. That said, the variety and quality of members is astonishing, and must be experienced to be understood.

Come by and see for yourself; jump in with both feet.

The following links might help, all from ADN user @eyes, who knows what he is talking about, literally. These are all podcasts, each less than 10 minutes long:

Basic primer on ADN

Some non twitter uses of ADN

How to find new people on ADN

App,net (ADN) is faster-moving than a forum and has a slightly different default format than Plurk. It is my belief that it may be desirable for some ADN users to have a user interface that is more conversational in orientation than the usual Twitter-centric arrangement. In addition, there are ways in which an ADN conversational interface could blow by the forum and Plurk UIs.

Most of my App.net experience is with Kiwi and Netbot, both of which I like very much. That basic UI form would be fine with me as a place to start. I would add the Plurk/Forum method of displaying conversations, of course, and there are probably a number of improvements that could be added, some of which have already been prototyped on App.net, such as those that @duerig has pointed me to.

Just as examples, once inside a conversation and with a response selected, the right and left arrows or swipes could take you to the responders stream. The opposite action or key would bring you back to the conversation. An input box could be used to filter conversations so that only those with certain hashtags or responders would be displayed, and to explore for conversation you would like to join.

I suppose that’s enough of a solo exposition. My immediate goal would be to assemble a small team of App.net folks who want work on a project to produce a conversation-centric app, starting with exercising our brains to find ideas better than those I have let dribble out of my brain, then coming up with a plan to proceed with the final design, production and testing of the app.

If you have any interest in participating, PM me. Thanks!

I have been involved in a number of conversations there regarding Conversation-Centricity; App.net already has some of it, but it still needs improvement. There are some great people interested and I have an interest in starting a project with the goal of building desktop and mobile ADN apps that concentrate on the conversation, but retain all of the tools (at least) made popular by apps like Kiwi.

Because I have spend so much time on Plurk, and believe it to be a great vehicle for intelligent discussions (although it is rarely used that way), I’ll use it for an analogy. Most people are put off by the Plurk web client interface, which looks like this:

The original posts or Plurks, i.e., those that are not responses to other posts, for all the people that you follow, are shown horizontally, with the newest on the left and the flow to the right as new non-response posts are made. When one clicks on a Plurk, the responses to it are displayed:

The horizontal timeline is not important to me. Rather, I am interested in the use of an “original” (non-response) post as a subject header, and the ability to display the entire ensuing discussion in a single listing, including all participants, ordered by the post time, with a space at the bottom for a participant to reply.

This conversational philosophy is maintained in mobile Plurk apps without any loss of utility. For example, the UniPlurk iOS app lists “original” subject posts vertically, like this:

Tapping the subject post or swiping left reveals the conversation attached to that original post, as follows:

Please be aware that there are a few different type of timelines. The one shown above represents a depiction of “All Plurks,” i.e., all non-response subject posts. One can also get views that show only your own Plurks, only private Plurks, only Plurks to which you have responded. There is no equivalent to the Global stream.

What’s important is the ability to show the subject posts for various parts of your stream, to be able to quickly get to all the responses for any subject post, and to be able to quickly scan and reply.

That’s all I’m good for tonight. More tomorrow, including a lot of detail and philosophy, and some ideas on how to translate this into App.net.

Twitter is for announcements; Plurk is for conversations.

I have now been around App.Net for a month or so, having happily paid my way for a year in order to help that growing site along. I have primarily been watching the global stream and looking at the available apps and the API. In the end, I have had to add this experience as a corollary the quotation above:

App.Net is still Twitter, though without the crap and with much better ethics.

We can thus perform a bit of language parsing and run the combined meaning up the logic tree. The result is:

Twitter and App.Net are for announcements; Plurk is for conversations.

That is not a brick thrown at App.Net. I think their model is much more sustainable and infinitely cleaner from an ethical standpoint than is Twitter. Nevertheless, it is still based on the announcement rather than the conversation. Clearly, that is the preferred method of communication for most people. Twitter thrives and Plurk does not, except in Taiwan.

On Twitter and App.Net, one makes an announcement and rarely looks back; conversations are quickly lost in the larger stream. There are targeted replies to a significant number of these announcements, but they are not threaded, nor are they really inclusive. They may be masquerading as conversation, but it is very difficult to see a complete conversation thread, consider the input to date, and then make a comprehensive, logical contribution to the conversation, building a cohesive whole as the conversation develops.

It does not have to be that way, given the data being maintained by the App.Net system and the API available to manipulate it. Although not specifically built for representing threaded conversations, the system could be bent in such a way that it could perform that function, in much the same way that Patter uses the data to divide App.Net posts into a set of separate (public and private) chat rooms. But, sorry, that’s the same technology that brought me into social networking in 1980: the CompuServe CB Simulator. Thus, no cigar.

Nor do I particularly feel like putting together an app that would divide the App.Net data into true conversations, as is done on Plurk. I have fairly effectively given up a life of programming and am learning instead to be a decent user of good code. Now I write mainly fiction. Anyway, were it successful, such an app would probably cause scaling problems which would strain App.Net resources, plus the consideration that App.Net would reap any profits from such a venture.

So, while I love the idea of paid social networking services without the privacy issues of the larger players, I am still looking for a social network that is all that, plus conversational.

Instead of inspiration and leadership, we get unreliable numbers and opinion, rarely guided by anything so old-fashioned as fact. Neither candidate could be bothered to say anything that even resembled the truth, relying instead upon the theory that if a lie is told often enough, people will come to believe it. Suffice it to say that it was not a highlight of even political thought.

Worse, neither candidate could be bothered to say anything much about people and what people may need. When people were mentioned, they were mentioned as examples of cost, one way or another. It is bad enough to be subjected to political polemics ad nauseum, but it is purely nauseating when our leaders care only about money, without even a nod to the individuals they claim to represent.

Pandering so completely to the gods of the dollar while clearly not even considering the human beings that make up our country’s population plunges all of America into the bottomless philosophical toilet of the dollar. There is no component of this rhetoric which even begins to consider either ethics or humanity.

How on earth can we be expected to lift ourselves onto any sort of higher plane when our leaders insist on throwing us into the water and endlessly flushing? Why do we let the specter of mindless and impersonal business run our lives? Have we all forgotten what it feels like to be a compassionate human being in the face of rampant greed for money and power?

We should, truly, be ashamed for the candidates, and for ourselves.

This latter observation may be part of the reason why the former issue exists, but I doubt it. I think the aggressive motorist came first, and I think he is the way he is because he (and almost everyone else) has no respect for their government, and further that their government has earned that lack of respect.

Every week seems to bring with it another crime by a senator or congressman, and even those crimes have needed to be heinous indeed in recent years to merit the culprit being singled out. It’s not hard to see that most long-term politicians leave office these days with more money than they came in with; it’s not too hard to see beyond the wealth to the methods. We are more than used to watching our politicians bickering like small children, while at the same time saying almost nothing of value.

These sorts of things trickle down, though Reaganomics never did. Watching the sideshow that is our government today being controlled by lobbyists so that the politicians can get more money to be re-elected turns a lot of stomachs. As importantly, those that don’t even notice the details can still absorb how obvious the lying, cheating, and stealing have become.

There are a few ever-present reminders of government around us in our daily lives.  One is the road construction or repair that blocks our way several times a day, all those places where there are orange cones and expensive equipment, but often no sign of any actual work being done. Another is the police car, a sort of a friend / enemy, depending upon whether we are speeding or in need of assistance.

As for the morning Philly commuter, the police are just in the way, regardless of their jurisdiction. Once it became clear that government officials were much less than pristine examples of authority, the authority of law enforcement began to go the way of the wild goose. With all respect lost, the doctors, stockbrokers,  lawyers and other workers in downtown Philly feel free to do whatever they want, however dangerous or reckless. If the lawmakers won’t follow the laws, why should they.

The police seem to not even be trying. Given that there are somewhere between 2 and 4 sworn police officers of all kinds for every thousand citizens, maybe discretion is the better part of valor. So the commuters feel free to drive 90 miles an hour, or 16 inches from your rear bumper, or worse, while the police have apparently given up any possibility of reversing the trend.

The mentality of the Philly commuter is creeping into other areas of our lives, as well. I would guess that as respect for elected officials wanes, there will be more cheating on taxes, less teaching of ethics to children and youth, more “excusable” crimes depicted in our entertainment media, less attention paid to citizenship, more attention paid to personal greed, and so on.

 
One wonders where it might end, this disrespect for our government. Just now, it suits the major corporations that keep the government bought and paid for. We are less likely to complain about what we no longer respect. Perhaps, though, the citizenry will finally tire of having a government that they can’t respect. On that day, when they are finally pushed over the edge, we would all do well to remember that British government that we could not respect 300+ years ago, and what happened to them.

Big-Ass 2012.

Clearly, these persons wasted the last several years of their lives, those years during which society was supposed to impart an ability to reason, lessons which passed right by these “students.’ They may just as well have saved the last four years at a place they didn’t want to be anyway and moved directly into the trailer park right after middle school.

Just as clearly, these were people who believed it when they were told they were special, who were given everything but the tools to succeed in life, who failed to learn much of anything useful during their scholastic” lives. These young people believed in the lie that they were getting the education they needed, rather than the education that our leaders feel that we can afford to give them without causing themselves re-election problems.

They were failed by their parents. They were failed by their teachers. They were failed by society as a whole. All of that time, all of that effort, wasted. They probably passed the required state and federal testing, “earning” a diploma, yet were not able to come up with a simple declarative sentence about their experience thus far in life, other than “Big-Ass 2012.”

Their sign said nothing more than “Look at me, look at me.” They didn’t even know enough to know what they missed, or how truly moronic that sign made them look. It’s silly enough to think that graduating from high school makes one special, especially in a society which believes that everyone deserves a trophy, every time, for everything they do, no matter how poorly. Their sign made it clear that they were more than silly, impinging on the rude and the practically uncultured.

One hopes that exposure to real life, including those facets which require them to take care of themselves and truly compete and cooperate, will round out their education, teaching them things that can’t be answered by filling in a test bubble with a Number 2 lead pencil. One hopes that they can learn on their own what their parents and teachers failed to teach them. Somehow, most of them eventually do.

But those that were left behind despite political rhetoric, and there are a lot of those kids, after realizing how little they know and starting to learn in their twenties, will already be many years behind, just as even our most well-rounded students are many years behind students of many other countries. We may give the biggest tests, and we may promote the best technology, but we are not succeeding, all to often, in teaching our children and students to critically think.

I believe in another kind of random, events generated by the vast uncaring universe that surrounds us all. That is “uncaring” in the sense of simply not being interested, like any other force of nature. Sunshine is not interested in whether or not you get a burn, a tornado is not interested in whether one home is destroyed while another is not. Both just are, without thinking or feeling much of anything.

So, when you least expect it, your left rear tire goes slowly flat. Or you find a twenty-dollar bill that you didn’t know you had. Just like the random number generator, the scale of events differs, randomly of course, so you are just about as likely to get a broken leg as a flat tire or to win big on a scratcher as finding $20. The Universal Randomness Generator (URG) is always set to provide a number between infinity and minus infinity with any possible magnitude, with all possible events to choose from, though “choose” is probably the wrong word.

This theory is pretty much the exact opposite of predestination. Instead of all events having been willed by god in advance, the universe provides each of us with random events, sometimes in serial and other times in parallel, sometimes good and sometimes bad; we simply get to react to them. It is likely that our reaction has nothing to do with what the next random event or events will be. Instead, they just keep coming, randomly.

Like the randomness of flipping a coin, sometimes we get a head, then a tail, and at other times we get a tail followed by 34 heads, or vice-versa. All the while the importance of each event is also random, from life-changing to miniscule in meaning. There is a theory that predicts that randomness in things like a coin toss, heads and tails will come out more or less even after a sufficiently large number of tosses. In URG, there is no such rule, although similar results could possibly be obtained in a life sufficiently long.

There is no need to ask why that nice Mr. Anderson died of cancer. It was random. There is no need to ask why that rotten politician got both rich and away with it. That was random, too. None of this means that we can avoid responsibility for our actions; how we respond to these random events measures us as a person. The quality of our responses to the random good and bad that enters our life will be the essence of how others remember us, which is as close as we can ever come to eternal life.

Great people are often those who respond magnificently to randomness of great magnitude. It is possible that those of us who never attain greatness were confronted only by random events of a smaller magnitude, so that greatness really is as random as it seems. We are not responsible for the events. We are just responsible for our reactions, no more, no less. We are only as good as our non-random reactions to the completely random universe.

It takes a great deal of time to handle all of the pieces of social networking, and it has to become an integral part of your marketing operations. Build a Facebook page. Post there on a regular basis. Tweet cleverly and often. Always link back to your Web site, but don’t seem to be a gung-ho marketer. Look at every post from either service. Whether aimed at you by hash-tag or direct message, reputation management requires that you always know what people are saying. If you have a product that would benefit from services like Foursquare or Groupon, invent suitable promotions and run them often.

All of these processes take knowledge, thought, and time. They are best done by a professional, but more cheaply done by an extant employee. In either case, it is not always easy to attribute sales directly to social networking. Much of what is gained is made possible by conversations with customers and potential customers over time. And not everyone who is positively influenced by these factors mentions that social networking brought them to your client’s store.

It is probably more difficult to track the benefits of services like Twitter and Facebook than those which are represented by specific offers. And often, when tracking the outcome of specific on-line offerings, businesses find that they are more trouble than they are worth in hard dollars, especially for local businesses. Nor does it help that companies as large as General Motors are abandoning featured sites like Facebook. It gets harder every day to make an ROI case for social networking, especially on Facebook.

Admittedly, it is not easy to define the ROI for print of broadcast media, either, but those marketing paths are venerable and there are established norms for tracking success or failure. My take is that today’s marketing climate requires at least some involvement with the major services. The question is, how much expense can you justify via ROI if you bill for doing it, and how much less effective will a client employee be at the same tasks, given the combination of lesser expense and concomitant lesser expertise.

Do you have any strong feelings on this subject? We would be happy to learn from them if you’re willing to share.